Archives

Series

Meta

Disney Legendary – A New Blog Project

The time has finally come to unveil a new project that I will be working on with my partner Carl Li. I’m sure that this is nowhere near what any of you thought it would be, and that is my favorite thing about it. I’m going to start off with a little bit of a story and then I’ll explain the project itself and how it will fit into the contents of this blog. But first, a disclaimer.

This Project will not be sold or distributed.

While the ideas and experiences are mine, the characters and properties involved in this project are owned by Disney and Marvel and I do not claim to own them in any way shape or form.

It’s important to me that we get that out of the way right off the bat, because in telling my friends about this project, their first thought has been that I will get sued. I am in no way hoping to sell this, manufacture it or distribute it. It will exist purely for my own enjoyment and of course for sharing a fun adventure with you guys! Now about that story.

It all starts with an idea.

How it Started

I frequent this adorable blog where this woman is making this amazing Disney cross-stitch picture. I also noticed when we were at Disney World several people who had made custom Disney T-Shirts or hats. It started my brain thinking about what fun thing I could make that would be all my own. A way to show my love for Disney and a way to learn even more about it. Well, something other than this blog that is. The idea sat in the back of my brain and drank orange juice, waiting for the perfect time to grab my attention once again.

Our current board game collection…

If you’ve been following this blog for a while or if you’ve ever checked out my Instagram, you’ll know that I am a huge fan of board games. We own an unnecessary amount of them and often have game nights where we invite friends over to play them. If you were to create a list of my favorite things, it would probably go: Disney, Cookies, Board Games. In that order. Recently, I finally picked up a game which has been out for a while now and I fell head over heels in love with it, snatching up ever Expansion and extra piece of the game I could find. That game was Marvel Legendary.

What is Marvel Legendary?

Before I can even start to talk about this project, I need to explain Marvel Legendary because it is the bedrock of what we want to do.

Marvel Legendary is what we board game folks call a Deck-Building Game. Essentially, you start with a deck of 12 cards, drawing a hand of 6 at a time. You start out with a deck of awful cards. They are very weak and can’t do much. But then, you slowly start to buy better cards in order to rack up points or fight things or other ideas which come into play in these Deck-Building games. In Marvel Legendary, you start out with some SHIELD operatives and you use them to start to buy heroes from the HQ and defeat villains who are marching through the city creating chaos. The goal is to try to stop the villains before they escape.

The game board.

You and other players are cooperatively fighting these villains and recruiting heroes in order to eventually create a ‘team’ or deck of cards strong enough to defeat a Mastermind, the big bad of the game. All the while, Bystanders are being kidnapped and a wicked Scheme is unfolding which, if successful, would mean that the heroes, we the players, have lost and the Mastermind has triumphed. It’s a lot to take in but over the coming weeks of this project, we’ll go a lot more in depth on it all.

Why I love it

I immediately fell in love with this game because the story element of the scheme is so captivating. A Scheme is drawn at random before setting up the game and then ‘Scheme Twist’ cards are shuffled into the Villain’s deck, usually about 7 or 8 of them. As they come out, they push forward the story. In one, we saw dark portals opening in the city spaces, making the villains in them more powerful. In another, the scheme twist meant that villains were entering the HQ, invading our heroes and making it harder to recruit. It presents this constant need to have to readjust and think differently ever time you play.

Not to mention that there are dozens and dozens of heroes and they all play differently. Some are great attackers, while others are perfect for recruiting and others have crazy abilities, allowing you to use other players’ cards or rescue even more bystanders. The game is just filled with depth and interesting ideas. And after playing round after round of the game, The OJ drinking idea started to knock on the door of my imagination.

Welcome to Disney Legendary

After much discussion and a bit of coercing, Carl and I will be turning the game into our own version. We found a card template online and armed with that and a whole bunch of ideas, we are planning to take the mechanics of this game and build a Disney Version of it. We’ll be putting together decks of Heroes, creating cards, playing with them to find the balance in the game and then making evil Masterminds and crafty villains to fight. We’ll even be painting our own board! Some people paint murals of The Lion King for fun to show their love for Disney. Others quilt. We will make our very own board game!

How YOU can be involved

Creating a slew of cards and characters with different names and attributes is not easy so as we progress, I’ll be asking for ideas for names or sub-names or powers. There will be a lot of my love for Disney history and Park history infused in this game and we’ll constantly be showing you where we are at in the creative process. We know the initial characters and villains we want to use, but as we get deeper in, we’ll be looking for suggestions and we’ll even have a contest for you guys to pick our first ‘expansion’ set to build, once the first group is complete. Think of this as an interactive art project. Every step along the way, we’ll be updating here and letting you know the progress! It’s also a great way to make sure we don’t give up!

So that’s it! That’s the plan. Take a board game we love and re-purpose it with Disney goodness and then share that with you. I can’t wait for you guys to see some of what we (hopefully) come up with. From card design to mechanics and game balancing, this is all uncharted territory for us. I’m sure it will be a challenge at times, but as Walt once said:

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
-Walt Disney

Let me know what you think of the project in the comments and as always, check out more Disney fun by clicking HERE!

Also, love your review and explanation of the game. I want to play it now!

You seem to have a lot of cool games and as a game player myself, I wish you would start a game section on the blog. You could review your other games and explain them. I’m always looking for new games to buy and would love to hear what games you have and enjoy!

ACTUALLY part of my long term plan is to make this project and gateway into just that! For a while I’ve struggled with how to integrate board games into a Disney/writing blog. Hopefully this starts to bridge that gap 🙂

This sounds like a fantastic idea and i’m keen to see how it develops!

For one of our modules on my degree we had to design a board game. As someone who doesn’t play these Build-A-Deck / RPG type board games my effort was less than stellar, but it was a fun exercise and – as you’ve hinted at – quite involved when you start creating rules.

I’m very tempted to try Marvel Legendary just based on your description. I really enjoy board games in general and these scenario ones really appeal to me.. I just need to find someone to play with!

Reblogged this on KCRRLives! – The Personal Blog of Carl K. Li and commented:
For the past year I’ve been working on designing board games, about 5 in total or more now, but still NONE of them are complete. One of my first projects was to create custom cards for the DC Deck Building Game, which I also ended up creating whole new mechanics to make it more of a dueling game, and an expanded version that changes almost everything making it into more of a board game. To make sure that track record continues, I’m going to start another game project ha ha. This one is to create a Disney version of Legendary by Upper Deck (Marvel Legendary specifically). This one will more likely be completed since it’s a cooperative effort with my partner Jaysen Headley who is super passionate about this, board games and all things Disney. I love collaborating. Also, Jaysen will be using his blog to keep us accountable. Here’s Jaysen’s blog post explaining a lot of it.